American climate scientists will soon lose access to satellite data, tracking the area of sea ice - one of the key indicators of climate change. US Department of Defense has announced plans to stop processing that data for scientific needs.
This decision is another blow to science by the US government amid budget cuts aimed at redistributing funds for tax breaks. The Goddard Institute for Space Research and the National Science Foundation have already been evicted from their premises, references to climate change have been removed from government websites, funding for hurricane forecasts has been discontinued, and a number of NASA missions are threatened with closure - teams are tasked with preparing plans to curtail projects within the scope of the agency's massive budget cuts.
Now the restrictions will also affect the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where scientists used data from the SSMIS Microwave Radiometer, installed on satellites of the Meteorological Satellite Observation Program of the US Air Force. These satellites scan the Earth's surface and measure sea and land ice coverage.
Although the Ministry of Defense collects this data primarily for the needs of naval planning, processed information has always been open to the scientific community. Now it is planned to stop its distribution among scientists, which threatens to interrupt decades of observations of climate change in the polar regions.
This decision is causing serious concern among climate scientists, because consistent satellite observations are critically important for studying sea ice melting rates, forecasting climate scenarios and developing measures to adapt to global warming.